I fell off my bike yesterday (it skidded from under me when I braked and changed direction on a wet and slippery road) and inflicted a fair amount of damage on my knee, thigh and elbow. Things were made more complicated than necessary when I staged a spectacular faint in the waiting-room of a local [...]
Don’t miss the brilliant verses by Rachel North, 7/7 bombing victim, on New Labour’s assault on our civil liberties [More >>>]
Thanks to Councillor Bob Piper of Sandwell Labour Party (who he?) for providing a link, in his blog, to a wonderful clip of the Red Army choir doing a rousing performance of Kalinka [More >>>]
Peter Hain’s Observer article of 17/09/06 reads like a manifesto for a leadership bid and contains clear if coded criticisms of some of the most objectionable features of the Blair premiership. It would be tragic, not just for him, if despite his many merits he were to be disqualified by his South African and Liberal pasts, both wholly unobjectionable [More >>>]
Did the Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman really say: “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence”? Too good to be true, surely? [More >>>]
The implications of a hung parliament after the next election are intriguingly complex and unpredictable, with all sorts of possible manoeuvres and outcomes that few seem to have foreseen [More >>>]
A few examples of remarks, written or spoken, about which the author might usefully have had second thoughts [More >>>]
Clare Short is standing down as a Labour MP in order to campaign at the next election for a hung parliament leading to proportional representation: a wholly misconceived idea, unfortunately [More >>>]
Martin Amis’s Observer Review essay (10 Sept 06) on Islamicist terrorism and its roots in religious faith should be required reading for anyone interested in this key phenomenon of our age and its implications for all religious faith [More >>>]
Media reports of last week’s discovery of brain activity indicating a response to the spoken word by a patient diagnosed as in Persistent Vegetative State mostly ignore the exciting work done in the past decade in London in establishing genuine communication with patients misdiagnosed as in PVS [More >>>]
